s/o CC Ancients Thread

[Saille]

I was reading this thread, and I started to think about entrenchment. Authors who are interested in different things, or coming at their writing from a different perspective, are bound to prioritize certain stories over others. I guess I'm talking about unconscious bias, but that's not really my point. What I'm really getting at is that the OT made me wonder what stories I'm not terribly likely to hear, just because they aren't the ones generally favored by secular authors. Are there certain historical events or civilizations that secular historians tend to overlook, not b/c the primary evidence is in religious texts, but simply b/c they're not one's focus if one isn't writing for religious purposes? Conversely, if one is reading books that focus on history from a biblical perspective, are there some pretty interesting events that just won't fit in the book, or are too far off the beaten path of the narrative?

 

I'm just thinking out loud. I've always loved series where authors release prequels, or side stories. I think this is poking me in that particular spot. Am I missing good stories? I can't have that!

[Rebecca VA]

I must be really dense this week, because I'm not understanding. Can you give examples of what you're thinking of?

[Orthodox6]

What I would observe is that EVERY history book is written to promote a particular point of view. Does not matter whether the book be "religious", "secular", or a comic book. Just is how things are. Best antidote is to read about the same time period, or same set of events, using disparate sources.

[swimmermom3]

Are you thinking that if you read the Ancients from a secular perspective you would miss stories from the Hebrews and if you followed Ancients from a Christian perspective, you would miss certain stories (especially mythology) because they don't meet the Christian paradigm? Or am I missing the boat as well?

[Saille]

Are you thinking that if you read the Ancients from a secular perspective you would miss stories from the Hebrews and if you followed Ancients from a Christian perspective, you would miss certain stories (especially mythology) because they don't meet the Christian paradigm? Or am I missing the boat as well?

 

Yes, yes! Looking at this now, bias is not the word I'm looking for. I'm thinking about *scope*. I'm wondering if the scope of the average secular narrative rules certain things out as "side jaunts", and likewise for non-secular texts. So, even if you're reading more than one secular history text, perhaps no one will ever bring up a topic that would be regular fare in a non-secular text. Does that make sense?

[Ester Maria]

Yes, yes! Looking at this now, bias is not the word I'm looking for. I'm thinking about *scope*. I'm wondering if the scope of the average secular narrative rules certain things out as "side jaunts", and likewise for non-secular texts. So, even if you're reading more than one secular history text, perhaps no one will ever bring up a topic that would be regular fare in a non-secular text. Does that make sense?

There is no unbiased, ideology-free position on anything and while the pretense of "objectivity" is a laudable goal, at the end of the day, (1) what makes into the text in the first place as well as (2) what are the explicit and the implicit connectors of the parts of the text will be a product of a subjective mind.

 

(1) What makes into the text: when writing history, you are writing from a different "mental mode" than when writing fiction. You want your text to represent the reality you are referring to, to reconstruct that world in your text. There is no "model" of reality you could compare your text to (even if that were theoretically possible) to see how well you did the assignment. What you refer to no longer exists, its temporal-spatial coordinates are something you get second hand, via a bunch of texts, "texts" (since for many of those you don't know to what extent they're fictional texts), proofs, "proofs", various testimonies and pseudo-testimonies, and you're faced with very, very limited number of resources to reconstruct a very complex world. The further you go in the past, the less documented it is.

 

And here we come to a BIG, HUGE obstacle which many people overlook:

The sources might not be representative.

Even if we don't put into the question the veracity of those sources (and more often than not we CAN question that), it's impossible to know that what we have left of a specific world is enough to reconstruct it and is representative of it at all. Meaning, in our reconstruction we can draw completely wrong conclusions based on treating the "remaining part" as a WHOLE.

 

Which leads us to the second big problem when reconstructing history, and that's, what I marked as (2), the "glue" each writer uses to put the pieces together and draw connections between different things - some of them obvious, some of them only implicit. The perspective is VERY important and it often dictates how you will view the fact themselves. So even if there weren't ideological component in picking what's important and what makes into the text (and there is), you have lots of ideology when gluing things together. It's always, inevitably, glued through a specific perspective. You cannot avoid it. And as (1) and (2) are connected, sometimes 2 will influence 1 - the perspective will influence what makes into the text, and that's basically what you're talking about.

 

The thing is... You talked about religion now.

If I told you there were very clear monotheist streams of thought in Greek philosophy, there are hypothesis (and solid ones) that the Greeks of later periods (but even classical maybe) treated what we call their "religion" more like a national folklore than like a religion, and that many researches claim the Homeric epics to be sort of "The Lord of the Rings" of the period (i.e. without any historicity except for the maybe certain spatial references)... And, on the other hand, that if you step away from the classical rabbinic thought you can read polytheism into the text of the Torah just as nicely, not to even go into all you can despute and debate in the text of NT... Things are not often what they seem.

 

People tend to dumb down, idealize and grossly oversimplify classical antiquity, since it's no longer "here" (unlike the Biblical culture, which is well and alive and still sticks to that "gone" world and to that one text so much that it cannot get that oversimplified as classical antiquity can). It's a very, very complex world, which is why I personally would never study it by somebody with an underlying agenda from the "other side" (namely, Judeo-Christian religious thought). And while nobody can be objective about it, some can at least try to be morally neutral, while the others, by their nature, cannot.

 

In short, don't study classical antiquity (Greece & Rome) by religious programs. It's not that they will skip good stories, who cares about that, you can google whatever you want nowadays; it's that their "glue" is very problematic, their entire perspective is morally biased (not necessarily in a BAD way, of course - if you're religious and support the idea of God's absolute morality given to you in your religion, that's exactly what you want, that kind of biased approach; but as you ask I'm assuming you don't want this). That has been my personal experience both as a student and as a teacher, when selecting my materials.

[Saille]

This reminds me of a story I once wrote for English in which people from the future found "artifacts" from the 1990's and had to posit what they were.

 

Ester Maria, you rock. That was an enormous amount of effort to put into answering my original post. I don't disagree with anything you said; I share your approach to history.

 

That said, it's interesting that you mention googling. You said,

 

"It's not that they will skip good stories, who cares about that, you can google whatever you want nowadays"

 

Strangely, rabbit-trail reading habits led me to this thread last night:

 

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=132871&highlight=maya+frost

 

The thread links to an article of E.D. Hirch's, "You Can Always Look It Up - Or Can You?". It talks about the effectiveness of looking things up, and the seeming paradox that, in order to effectively look things up, you must already have some clear foundational understandings.

 

And that's why I started this thread. How can I look up what I don't know if I don't know that I don't know it? I'm hoping that somewhere out there, some person who was reading religiously based histories read a secular history text and said, "Hey, where are A, B and C?" Then I can go look those up, because I'll know what I don't know. :D

[Ester Maria]

That said, it's interesting that you mention googling. You said,

 

"It's not that they will skip good stories, who cares about that, you can google whatever you want nowadays"

 

Strangely, rabbit-trail reading habits led me to this thread last night:

 

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=132871&highlight=maya+frost

 

The thread links to an article of E.D. Hirch's, "You Can Always Look It Up - Or Can You?". It talks about the effectiveness of looking things up, and the seeming paradox that, in order to effectively look things up, you must already have some clear foundational understandings.

Certainly, I assumed the underlying understanding of the material - after all, you can hardly teach what you do not understand.

What I wanted to emphasize though is that the perspective is just as important as the content, and if you have the perspective right, it's easy to make up for some of the content you find important, while the opposite might not be right.

 

Regarding how to know what you might be missing, stories-wise, I think that if you have the familiarity with the sources (Bible itself on one hand; Theogony and the works regarding Theban/Troian cicle on the other hand) it should not be a problem to detect what's missing in the curriculum and you want to include. :)

[Carol in Cal.]

... in much secular history is religion and its influence on behavior and events. I'm not talking about Providential history here--the belief/teaching that God orchestrates all of history--but rather the effect of religious beliefs and practices on what people observably do.

 

So for instance, in college as I studied early American history, I had a secular professor who was a very good student of the Puritans. She could lecture on their beliefs and their actions that arose from those beliefs so effectively that people would accost her afterwards to debate theology with her.

 

But she was very flippant/disparaging about American Christianity in the first part of the 19th century--the Great Awakening, the scorched earth stuff, the revival meetings--she really didn't seem to understand all of that at all, and she seemed to look down on it. Also, she was so completely unable to empathize with the Abolitionists that she made them sound like they were all maniacs--she said that they tried to send escaped slaves to Canada because they wanted to be martyrs--how sick would that be, to want to be tortured to death? Instead, they wanted to act on their faith as the martyrs had, and let the chips fall where they may. She just didn't get it.

 

And more than anything, that's what I see in the secular resources...an entire, significant stream of motivation that is left out or very distorted. Not so much missing stories as missing reasons for those stories.

 

(Literature, of couse, is a whole other matter. English language literature written through about 1960 is so pervaded with allusions to KJV Bible stories and quotes that you lose a whole big layer of it if your mind doesn't leap to those recognitions.)

[Ester Maria]

... in much secular history is religion and its influence on behavior and events.

I'd formulate it this way: Much secular history are ideologies and their influences on behavior and events. Religion, from most secular perspectives, is approached merely through the glasses of "the dominant ideology of the period", not considered as a special kind of influence in another category. So that might give the impression of undermining.

And more than anything, that's what I see in the secular resources...an entire, significant stream of motivation that is left out or very distorted. Not so much missing stories as missing reasons for those stories.

I hear where you're coming from.

But on the other hand, things can go very wrong if you start explaining, for example, the Crusades or, in the more recent past, Zionism through the "religious" lens, reading religion into what were, essentially, politically and economically motivated events. That's the problem I see in religious perspective, not that it considers religion as a separate category influence apart from the other ideological constructs (and favorites a specific one), but that it tends to explain everything through its prism, which inevitably leads to a lot of "reading into" rather than simply "reading" history.

 

So while I absolutely agree that there are lots of secular authors who, under the pretext of objectivity, ignore or undermine the importance of an entire stream of thought and a layer of ideology, there is the opposite kind of threat from the side of the religious authors.

[Carol in Cal.]

I'd formulate it this way: Much secular history are ideologies and their influences on behavior and events. Religion, from most secular perspectives, is approached merely through the glasses of "the dominant ideology of the period", not considered as a special kind of influence in another category. So that might give the impression of undermining.

 

I hear where you're coming from.

But on the other hand, things can go very wrong if you start explaining, for example, the Crusades or, in the more recent past, Zionism through the "religious" lens, reading religion into what were, essentially, politically and economically motivated events. That's the problem I see in religious perspective, not that it considers religion as a separate category influence apart from the other ideological constructs (and favorites a specific one), but that it tends to explain everything through its prism, which inevitably leads to a lot of "reading into" rather than simply "reading" history.

 

So while I absolutely agree that there are lots of secular authors who, under the pretext of objectivity, ignore or undermine the importance of an entire stream of thought and a layer of ideology, there is the opposite kind of threat from the side of the religious authors.

 

In my view, there are much worse things that this that some religious authors do. When they start to attribute events directly to God Himself, IMV they are going way too far.

 

And, BTW, I do know of a number of Christian sources who would not attribute the Crusades or Zionism just to religion, but I would also argue that religion was a significant influence in both of those events, though not the exclusive influence by any means.

[Ester Maria]

In my view, there are much worse things that this that some religious authors do. When they start to attribute events directly to God Himself, IMV they are going way too far.

Yeah, I know they exist, but I don't even consider those as legitimate partners in the discussion of anything, so that's why I left them out.

[Heather in WI]

And more than anything, that's what I see in the secular resources...an entire, significant stream of motivation that is left out or very distorted. Not so much missing stories as missing reasons for those stories.

 

 

This is why I like to read different perspectives and primary resources when at all possible. It's so easy to distort events based on our current lens. (Or fall for the distortion of a certain time period because you're reading the event through the author's lens which is influenced by the time period/philosophy of his age.) Every historian is limited by their own ideology.

 

I love this essay by CS Lewis:

 

http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/history/ath-inc.htm#ch_0

(CC warning. It is a Christian article by a Christian author. For the purpose of this discussion, I substitute "history" for "Christianity" when I read it. And, I only am referencing the first five or so paragraphs.)

 

I find it especially relevant when trying to understand history and historical motivations.

 

I like this paragraph:

 

 

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

 

 

I am a Reformed Baptist. I know this colors my view of events. That certainly doesn't stop me from reading Lutheran, Anglican, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Atheistic, Hindu, or Sikh primary sources, historical explanations, or literature. I relish understanding other people's points of view and their motivations. I don't think this would be possible without taking their religious beliefs, as they see them and view their influence on the events, into consideration.

[dragons in the flower bed]

Are there certain historical events or civilizations that secular historians tend to overlook, not b/c the primary evidence is in religious texts, but simply b/c they're not one's focus if one isn't writing for religious purposes? Conversely, if one is reading books that focus on history from a biblical perspective, are there some pretty interesting events that just won't fit in the book, or are too far off the beaten path of the narrative?

 

 

Well, yes, of course there are, and I think this is true in any history book and with any historian. You know that XKCD strip from a few weeks ago that said, "You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right"? Don't you wish that were true of history, too? But history, like childrearing, is totally dependent on the feelings one has about people in general. And on your goal as a historian. I like the history books by SWB in great part because she aimed to find a narrative line. That's a better goal than that of many other history books I've read.

 

And if it weren't for the contention between the two groups, or the Sneetch-like insistence on our individual parts that we are the true historians, we could make up a fun list of stories we never hear on the other side. There's a history book I'd read.

[Saille]

And if it weren't for the contention between the two groups, or the Sneetch-like insistence on our individual parts that we are the true historians, we could make up a fun list of stories we never hear on the other side. There's a history book I'd read.

 

EXACTLY!

 

Heather, thank you for that quote.

[mcconnellboys]

Well, I think it's hard to find out a lot of details about the very rich histories of peoples like the Magyars, Slavs, various Vietnamese and other peoples of Southeast Asia, Tibet, and a lot of Native American groups. Some of those that come to mind are the Makah, Tlingit, Moche, Micmac, gee there are really tons of them.....

 

I don't think that's really what you're asking, so sorry if I'm way off track. I don't think this sort of oversight has anything to do with being secular. I think those civilizations are just not considered seminal and are not that much studied and written about.

 

All authors come to the table with some sort of bias. All human beings are egocentric, ethnocentric. That's just how we're made; we can't help it. The best way to overcome author bias is to read from a wide variety of authors on most subjects. We never read a subject where we don't find differences in at least minor details, if not major details.

 

Regarding things that are Biblically related, I tend to read from Ginzberg's Legends of the Bible to help fill out side stories that did not get included in the Bible. These come from a treasury of folklore that was handed down by the Jewish peoples for millenia. While we have to remember that this is classed "folklore", it still gives me insight into what stories and beliefs were being handed down within the popular religious culture of those times. Now, it's not for young children. I only began reading some excerpts to my son this year, in sixth grade, and talking about those as part of our literature studies.

 

As for religious stories that don't get all that much air time, there are certainly any number of groups that was labeled "heretical" which arose from the time of the beginnings of Christianity and their stories don't get much attention. Those are not stories that I would delve into deeply with younger children, either, although we are certainly beginning to touch on some of them this year, as we study the medieval time period, because one can not truly do justice to a study of the development of the church without discussing the losers in the game.

 

I agree that it would be nice if series authors all created something like Tolkein's Simarillion so that we could delve more deeply into their writing process, particularly where they are creating other worlds, but this would be nice even for history studies. I think the history channel does this with "Making of the Movie xyz" type shows.....